People with mental illness are often capable of working to solve their own problems once they’ve been helped into safe, clean housing, a Canadawide study has shown.

The study is subsidizing housing for 1,000 people in five cities and comparing their lives over four years with 1,000 who don’t receive the help.

“They’re looking at the best ways of helping Canada’s most vulnerable population. The Housing First philosophy is finally getting it right,” said Louise Bradley, president of the Mental Health Commission of Canada said this week.

The commission is almost halfway through its 10-year mandate to transform Canadians’ attitudes toward mental illness and improve services and support.

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It will release a national interim report this summer and roll it out across the country, drawing attention in each province to the local efforts and implications.

The Housing First philosophy rethinks the traditional model of addressing homelessness among people with mental illness, which first treated the illness, getting the patients ready to go into the community and then finding a place for them to live.

Workers were often surprised and disappointed when the individuals were back in the hospital a few months later.

“It was a revolving door,” Bradley said. “With Housing First we don’t make unrealistic demands on people.”

The new model provides them with a safe place to live and “after a while people begin to think about their substance-abuse issues and their mental-health problems when they don’t have to worry about being warm,” she said.

“So far we are seeing good outcomes.”

Bradley recounted sitting in with a group of participants in Winnipeg a year into the study. Loneliness was a common theme for people who were adjusting to being away from the street community.

A year later, members of the same group were discussing their need for help in getting jobs, Bradley recalled.

“It was a very different discussion than the one I’d heard the previous summer.”

They wanted training and some were going back to school. Many were reconnecting with family after years away, she said.

The study operates in five cities, each of which is focusing on different aspects of the problem.

Moncton is focusing on rural populations; Montreal on vocational interventions and service provided in the community; Toronto is looking at ethno-racialized communities; Winnipeg at urban aboriginals; and Vancouver is looking at substance-use disorders and congregate housing versus scattered housing.

Researchers are gathering comparison data in eight followup interviews, learning how often people use emergency services, whether they’ve gone to jail and what interventions work best for which groups of people.

They’re looking at outcomes related to housing, health status, quality of life and the economic cost of the Housing First approach.

Early findings show a significant reduction in the use of emergency services and about 50 per cent reduction in the use of detention centres, Bradley said.

The average rents are between $575 and $960 and participants are required to contribute 30 per cent of their incomes. “It is a shared responsibility. This is not a do-for approach. We all know that doesn’t work.”

All participants have at least one serious mental disorder, about one-third are women and nearly all were unemployed at the outset.

Most had at least one physical condition, which has drawn attention to the strong correlation between chronic disease and mental illness, Bradley said.

More than one-third had involvement with the criminal justice system in the year before entering the project and many had been victimized in last six months in robberies and assaults.

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